Tragedy of the commons

Soon after writing last month’s column on the folly of bottled water, I came across the appalling fact that 40 percent of our nation’s rivers and streams are too polluted for swimming or fishing, let alone drinking.

That fact bears repeating: Americans have contaminated almost half of our nation’s water sources on which all life depends.

And we Americans are the lucky ones. As we continue to pour pesticides, herbicides, toxic sludge, pharmaceuticals and other waste into our water, as we insist on populating deserts and decorating them with suburban lawns and swimming pools and water parks, as we thoughtlessly run water from our taps, more than one billion people on the planet lack access to potable water. The World Health Organization says that water shortages, poor drinking water and poor sanitation (a result of a lack of water) kill about five million people worldwide each year.

Worldchanging.com reports that fresh water needs go up drastically as world population increases and lifestyles improve. A “combination of accumulating persistent pollutants in fresh water sources, depletion of old underground aquifers that recharge very slowly, and precipitation changes brought on by climate change and forest clearing” result in “sharply less fresh water available to meet ever-growing needs.” The unprecedented drought last year in the Atlanta, GA megalopolis attests to this frightening fact.

The 2007 United Nations’ World Water Assessment offers this summary: “ …of all the social and natural resource crises we humans face, the water crisis is the one that lies at the heart of our survival and that of our planet Earth.”

So… what are our plans here in the Upper Delaware River Valley in our (as of now) clean watershed? Some residents are eager to welcome gas drilling companies who, to facilitate hydraulic drilling and fracturing, require colossal amounts of water. For instance, for drilling projects in New York and Pennsylvania, Chesapeake Appalachia has filed one application with the Susquehanna River Basin Commission to withdraw 2.075 million gallons of water per day, and another application to withdraw up to 999,999 gallons of water per day. And this is just the beginning.

Despite these unprecedented demands and overwhelming evidence pointing to drinking water contamination where fracking has occurred, no single agency has the legislative, binding authority to protect our aquifers, rivers and streams.

The protections that were in place on the federal level, such as the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, were removed when the federal government enacted the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

No agency or over-arching governmental body exists that can enact a legally binding, regional moratorium on gas drilling in the Upper Delaware River watershed to weigh the potential loss of pure drinking water against any long-term benefits of procuring natural gas. Yet the federal government recently placed just such a two-year moratorium on solar energy projects in six Western states, citing the need for environment impact studies. Clearly, the Bush administration has carefully orchestrated its policies for the exclusive benefit of the gas and oil industries.

In a 1968 essay, ecologist Garrett Hardin postulated that a tragedy of the commons occurs when free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately dooms the resource through over-exploitation. When no one has the responsibility of managing a resource freely available to all, Hardin asserted, individual interests, in conflict with the common good, exploit the resource by overuse, resulting in its degradation and ultimate destruction.

Is this, then, the fate of the Upper Delaware River and its watershed? The gas will eventually run out. But long before that happens, we may sacrifice our most basic and precious resource, clean water.

- Marcia Nehemiah